From 1888 when Frank Sprague implemented the world’s first successful streetcar system in Richmond, Virginia through the 1920s, the electric streetcar symbolized the American transit industry.  In cities throughout the country the press followed the expansion and financial scandals of the traction industry, “traction” being the term that the public then used for streetcars.  

Baltimore streetcars in action, 1943. Photo from Library of Congress.

Landowners on the fringes of cities clamored to have traction lines extended to their lots, thereby making the lots much more valuable.  In as little as 30 minutes and for a nickel fare (a fare the middle class could afford) streetcars operating at average speeds of 12 mph could connect lots in the countryside with jobs and opportunity in the center.  Such relationships stimulated a huge demand for suburban living, and to meet it, traction lines expanded outward in all directions.  Population followed.  For the first time in their histories, the horribly overcrowded cities of America began to empty outward in the form of new streetcar suburbs, built on previously empty land around the city edges.  The center cities from which the middle and working classes fled changed as well, as department stores, specialized shops, corporate offices, financial firms, hotels, theaters, concert halls, and other less reputable types of entertainment rushed in to fill the voids left by the departing middle and working classes.

By the 1910s the streetcar had created a new American city characterized by specialized sections.  Iconic was the fashionable Central Business District, a vibrant area with specialized sub districts wherein were located almost all jobs and activities that the middle class wished to reach.  Poorer groups remained in cheaper, older housing surrounding the new center cities.  Factories and warehouses also remained packed around railroad yards.  Further out, extending along the electric car lines, were the new streetcar suburbs.  These were middle and working class bedroom districts, each a new homogenous enclave catering to a specialized income and ethnic group.  Every day the middle and working class populations surged into the center on electric cars and surged outward in the evenings.  Wives and children filled the cars during the middle of the days, and in the evenings and Sundays families used the cars for recreation. For the middle and working classes, the streetcar revolutionized the American city and the way in which they experienced it.

The streetcar vehicle evolved to efficiently fulfill the mass transit role called for it.  By the 1910s the modern streetcar was about 40 feet long and 8 feet wide, riding on two four-wheel trucks (or bogies). Each axle was driven by its own electric motor that was suspended from the axle.  Air pressure controlled the braking power. Cars typically had top speeds of about 30 mph. A cabin (“saloon”) in which passengers rode constituted about two thirds of the length of the vehicle. Many cabins were divided into a weather-protected section and an open-air part.  The rest of the length was comprised of large platforms projecting from both the front and rear of the car.  The platforms, which were lower to the ground than the cabins, contained large doors and vestibules from which passengers could board and alight.  The driver, called a motorman, stood at the controls on the front platform, and the conductor, who collected fares, stood on the rear platform.  The conductor communicated with the motorman with bells that he (rarely she in 1910) could activate by an overhead cord.  Terms like, “platform employees,” or, “platform hours,” still are used by some transit systems today to denote transit operating personnel (usually bus drivers) and the hours that they work serving the riding public.

In operation the streetcar was a crowd-eater.  Coasting into a stop thronged with waiting passengers, the streetcar’s gaping rear door beckoned the crowd to board.  As

The transit "crowd eater" in action in Oklahoma City. Photo from Library of Congress.

the last passenger cleared the steps, the conductor gave two quick yanks on the bell cord to the motorman, who replied with two loud clangs on the car’s traffic-warning brass gong affixed to the front.  The car lurched forward, and the conductor then collected fares as the car swayed and trundled along to its next stop, often interrupted by traffic congestion and furious bursts of clangs from the motorman’s gong.  As passengers paid their fares, they proceeded forward into the cabin to find a seat.  Those not finding a seat stood in the aisle holding onto leather straps hung from the ceiling, or they stood on the front platform, from which they ultimately alighted.  Cars from this period were not fast, but despite the huge crowds they ingested and disgorged, they did not lose time at passenger stops.  They truly were mass transit vehicles.

Several factors began the streetcar’s long decline around World War I.  Most immediately, the cost of labor and supplies more than doubled during the war, while streetcar companies were politically unable to raise the fare above the accustomed nickel, written into charters in the 1890s.  Profits turned to losses, and investment in tracks and streetcars dwindled commensurately.  Companies by and large stopped extending lines to undeveloped areas demanded by developers, and service became less frequent and more over-crowded.

Beginning about 1910 automobile registrations also climbed rapidly.  Auto ownership initially rose fastest in rural areas, but by World War I automobiles were widely distributed in cities, as well.  House builders began shifting their products from clients using streetcars to clients using autos.  In cities throughout the country developers by World War I were offering homes in areas not served by streetcars, though they still were using their political muscle to attempt to force streetcar companies to extend lines into new territory.  By 1925, however, housing developers no longer cared whether streetcar companies extended lines into new territory.  Streetcars had become irrelevant to them.

At the same time, motor trucks cut the tether between retailing and railroad yards and led to the extraordinarily rapid decentralization of retailing.  Horse-drawn wagons were slow and expensive, and in the pre-truck era, retailers could not afford to locate their stores beyond a short wagon haul away from the giant merchandise warehouses adjacent to the rail yards.  Almost all retailing was in the CBD.  With the adoption of trucks, however, retailers of all stripes radically decentralized.  The driving force was demand for free parking from the increasingly large number of customers who came downtown to shop in their autos.  Retailers quickly learned that the cheapest solution to the parking problem was building major branch stores, which could be easily supplied by truck from the central city warehouses.  By 1925 many venerable CBD-located firms were opening new stores in the suburbs that were grander and posher than their original CBD flagship stores.  The new stores all were built around auto access and free parking.  The highly centralized, streetcar-oriented retailing regime characteristic of the American city in 1910 had given way by 1925 to a decentralized regime characterized by rampant suburban strip retailing and free parking.  Already planners were talking about the decline of the CBD.

The combined weight of these forces pushed down streetcar patronage during the 1920s in all but the largest cities, and even there streetcar riders became increasingly dominated by those going to and from work.  The smaller the city, the more rapid was the loss of streetcar traffic.  Streetcar companies began abandoning lightly-used streetcar lines and replacing other lightly used lines with buses.  Most traction industry leaders thought that streetcars would continue serving the more heavily-traveled lines, however, and toward the end of the 1920s they formed the President’s Conference Committee to develop a super streetcar to reequip the “trunk” lines.  The committee was comprised of presidents of various streetcar companies and had at its disposal the best electrical engineering talent from the larger operating companies as well as from the streetcar manufacturing companies.  The result was the PCC car, which was unveiled in 1936, and which is considered today to be one of the marvels of American industrial engineering. More than 5,000 PCC cars were built between then and about 1952 for U.S. and Canadian application, but despite the car’s success as a piece of industrial engineering, it failed to save the American streetcar industry.

In the PCC car the traction industry sought and obtained a streetcar that could keep up with autos in stop and go traffic.  The PCC could accelerate smoothly and silently from a standing stop as fast as an auto, and it did so without jerking, an important consideration given that many of the streetcar passengers were standees.  It also could brake to a smooth stop just as rapidly.  Although its rate of acceleration fell off rapidly as it gained speed, the PCC could reach about 45 mph on level ground, if given enough time.  The PCC also was quiet.  It rode on trucks with rubber inserts to reduce

The PCC car was a last ditch effort to save the streetcar industry. It didn't quite work. This PCC car is on an active line in Philly. Photo by Scheib.

noise.  Rubber pads even separated the steel wheel treads from the centers.  The car was streamlined, as well, and looked as modern as the latest autos.  Finally, the motorman could operate the car entirely with foot pedals, leaving his or her hands free to act as a fare cashier.  The industry intended to operate the PCC with a crew of one. Passengers would enter one half of a double width front door, filing past the driver to pay fares. They would exit from the other half of the front door and from a double width center or rear door.

There were shortcomings in the PCC design, as well.  While its control system provided smooth acceleration and deceleration, it did not permit smooth running at a constant speed.  When the operator releases the accelerator pedal, the car immediately goes into deceleration mode. In city traffic this shortcoming is not a problem, but it is a problem if the car runs on its own right-of-way where autos are kept off the track and stations are far apart. If an operator wants to operate at a steady, say, 35 mph in such an environment, she would constantly have to keep pumping and releasing the accelerator pedal, which is hard on the control system and annoying for passengers.  Motor burnouts could and did happen when PCCs ran in such environments.  The PCC trucks also were designed to provide a smooth ride on track rigidly embedded in concrete; they give an uncomfortably bouncy ride on open railroad track, which is designed to “float” in a bed of gravel under the weight of moving trains.

Despite adopting the PCC car, after World War II the American transit industry continued replacing its streetcars with buses.  By the end of the 1960s vestigial streetcar services remained in only a handful of U.S. cities where streetcars had some speed advantage over buses, such as operating through lengthy tunnels, in subways downtown, or on long stretches of private right of way.  Toronto remained the sole city in Canada and the U.S. that continued to operate a very heavily-patronized, large, traditional streetcar system in city streets.

Whether streetcar loss was inevitable is hotly debated.  The traction industry had ceased influencing the growth of cities around 1914-1917, when the auto took away that role.  The traction industry also became unprofitable, and around 1920 it began losing passengers, at an increasing rate as the 20s progressed.  As a consequence, the industry had difficulty financing track and car renewal.  The Depression accelerated patronage and financing difficulties.  Congress further compounded the financing crisis during the 1930s, by requiring those electric utility companies that owned transit systems to divest themselves of the transit systems.  This action deprived the industry of another source of capital for renewing itself.

In this environment General Motors and other automotive interests financed a holding company called National City Lines to purchase transit operating companies around the country.  The purpose was to scrap streetcar systems and replace them with buses built by the General Motors subsidiary, Yellow Coach.  From then into the 1950s National City Lines purchased streetcar and bus transit systems around the nation, and it continued to operate many of its holdings into the 1960s.  It eliminated streetcar and electric trolley bus service on most but not all of the systems that it purchased.  It also outfitted all of its systems with new GM buses.  National City Lines provided staff management services for its operating properties and provided financing for buses and garages, as well.  It is true that many U.S. transit systems were not bought by National City Lines; yet, they were converted from streetcar to bus, as well.  

It also is true that most Canadian transit systems were municipally-owned, but save for Toronto, all converted from streetcar to bus or electric trolley bus.  National City Lines supporters point to these facts and state that NCL injected desperately needed capital into the transit industry and kept it going in private hands for another couple of decades; its detractors state claim NCL replaced viable electric streetcar systems with an inferior mode.  In the author’s opinion, the national interest would have been served by modernizing parts of many streetcar systems at the end of the 1920s, but doing so would have required municipalization and capital infusion from higher levels of government. Even then, given Canada’s experience, it is uncertain whether streetcars would have been modernized.  It is safe to say, however, that in the absence of such government takeover, the American streetcar industry could not have maintained itself. If National City Lines had not happened, some other combination of liquidators would have.

Fortunately, this is not the end of the American streetcar history.  The social protest movements of the 1960s helped foster a revolution in the transit industry.  During that decade the transit industry was municipalized with federal and in some cases, state aid.  The possibility of obtaining capital for building rail systems became real.  At the same time citizen movements, such as those dedicated to preserving neighborhoods by stopping inner city freeways and others to reducing air pollution, came together in some metropolitan areas with the idea that surface rail systems could help with urban revitalization.  Thus was born the light rail movement.  Its model was not the American streetcar, not even the PCC car, but a new concept coming out of northern European cities.

When faced with rebuilding their war-ravaged cities after World War II, German transit planners contemplated a future urban world dominated by the automobile.  Should their streetcar systems be rebuilt?  Many decided, yes, but they rejected the American objective of the PCC, which was a jack-rabbit like vehicle that was intended to blend in with traffic.  Instead, they reasoned that streetcars and autos needed to be separated.  Streetcars would be given their own rights of way.  There would be less emphasis on lightning-quick acceleration and more on achieving unimpeded movement.  There also would be a lot of thought given to getting streetcars through stops thronged with hundreds of passengers without encountering the infuriating boarding and alighting delays experienced by large volumes of passengers so typical of American bus transit systems.  (In America, passengers had to pay the driver, a system whose efficiency increases in direct proportion to the emptiness of the vehicle.)  

The new German streetcars would be comprised of large capacity vehicles strung together in trains.  Each car would have one to two double-width doors.  Passengers would buy their fares at vending machines or at kiosks and would not have to present the fare when they boarded.  Roving bands of inspectors, checking a percentage of the passengers at random, would enforce the fare regime.  Thus, passengers could board at any door.  When a three-car light rail train glided into a station, typically six to twelve double-width doors would fly open, allowing a waiting crowd of a hundred or more passengers to be absorbed in a few seconds, while just as many passengers got off.  What the Germans achieved was not a modern streetcar, but a hybrid of the streetcar ( “strassenbahn”) and a rapid transit train running through subways (“U-bahn”)  It was a new mode of transit unlike anything that previously had existed.  In short, the city railway (“stadtbahn”) was a surface-version of a short subway train, silently snaking through pedestrianized urban centers, ingesting and disgorging hundreds of passengers at strategic stops placed a quarter to half mile apart in the centers, and then running at speed on private lines with more widely-spaced stops to other major activity centers.

This was the rail transit concept advocated by activists in the 1970s, but they met resistance from the American transit industry, most of whose leaders stemmed from the National City Lines era.  Initial success in implementing the idea came in mid-sized, rapidly growing metropolitan areas, first in Edmonton in 1978, followed by Calgary and San Diego in 1981, and Portland, San Jose, and Sacramento in 1986-87.  The regions that have made best use of the German light rail model have tailored it to the American reality that metropolitan areas continued their path toward decentralization in an unrelenting manner over most of the last century.  

Planners in the most successful applications have conceived of their light rail lines as a tool in restructuring the bus system to serve suburban destinations, while the light rail lines serve the CBD and some important suburban destinations.  Planners have pulled much of the bus service out of the CBD, terminating it instead at suburban light rail stations.  Bus routes are made much shorter with fewer duplicative bus miles, and they take train passengers to important suburban destinations that are not on the rail lines. Light rail stations also are designed as places where passengers will be able to transfer between bus routes, thus achieving intra-suburban transit mobility.  This approach to system design reflects recognition on the part of planners that regional transit patronage is proportional to the number of jobs that are easily reached by the transit system, and that as much as 97 percent of regional jobs are found in suburban locations.

In some areas with integrated bus and light rail systems, planners are promoting the creation of denser housing, commercial, and employment centers adjacent to light rail stations.  Plazas and pedestrian walkways interconnect the various parts of such development, known as Transit-Oriented Development. Some planners suggest that the mere construction of a light rail line will cause TODs to spontaneously spring up around light rail stations, but that possibility seems doubtful.  It now is well known that the quality of a transportation investment that makes land more valuable for development is improved accessibility to population and jobs.  Accessibility of most parcels in the American metropolis to employment and population already is so high through the automobile/highway system that the small incremental accessibility coming to a parcel by virtue of a light rail station opening adjacent to it would have negligible impact on development.  On the other hand, building light rail lines into edge-city-type auto-oriented development, and then retrofitting that development to make it possible to walk between its various pieces and light rail stations, does appear to be yielding patronage results, as evidenced by San Diego’s Mission Valley Line

Regions following these concepts with success include San Diego, Portland, St. Louis, and Dallas, among others.  Light rail lines in these regions account for a small percent of route miles but thirty to sixty percent of the total transit traffic measured in either passenger miles or unlinked trips.  At the same time, passenger traffic per capita is growing, unlike systems with bus lines focused on the CBD (where passenger decline is severe), and operating expenses per passenger or passenger mile remain below industry norms for similar sized regions.

More recently some groups advocating densification of American cities are promoting revival of the classic American streetcar.  To date they have had more success in doing so in form than in function.  Typically, genuine old American streetcars have been found and refurbished or replicas have been constructed for such services, but a modern Czech streetcar now is being manufactured in the Portland area for such use. Most applications run cars around tourist-oriented track loops organizations have built in the old downtown areas that planners are attempting to revive. Streetcar drivers act as fare cashiers, and service generally is infrequent and slow. Although there are exceptions, such services typically do not function as part of the regular transit system; most tourist streetcars do not, for example, replace pre-existing bus routes or serve as a tool around which bus service in a sector of the city is restructured, as is typical with light rail.        

Exceptions include Portland’s streetcar (using Czech vehicles), which does a nice job connecting two inner city neighborhoods with the downtown and a university. Two other exceptions include a similar type of service using the same type of vehicle, just opened in central Seattle, and San Francisco’s F line, which although primarily a tourist-oriented ride, evolved from a traditional trolley bus.  The Portland service works well in part because much of it is in a fare-free zone, and the remainder uses the self-service proof-of-payment system, so boarding and alighting occurs through all doors. There is heavy demand for the San Francisco service, but cumbersome and slow fare collection hinders its usefulness. In the author’s view a modern streetcar similar to the Czech technology offers promise, but that promise will not be fully realized unless planners achieve the following:

• Applications that have high passenger demand (linking downtowns, major activity centers, and/or urban-scale neighborhoods);
• Applications able to serve that demand faster, cheaper, or cleaner (and more quietly) than buses;
• Fare systems that allow passengers to enter and leave all doors and that can board and alight scores of passengers in seconds;
• Integration of the service with the bus transit system, and if applicable, light rail service, achieving service improvement, productivity improvement and cost reduction in the process.

This article first appeared in the Streetcar issue of Trip Planner Magazine.

Dr. Thompson helped develop light rail systems in Edmonton and San Diego.  He is a professor of urban and regional planning and his book, The Passenger Train in the Motor Age: California 1910-1941 was published in 1993 by the Ohio State University Press.  His major reaseach interest is studying the role of public transportation in auto-dominated societies, both historically and in the present day.  Currently he chairs the research subcomittee of the Transportation Research Board’s Committee on Light Rail Transit.